Beside Myself

My first honest reaction to Beside Myself was that it is doing exactly one thing and it knows it. You drop into a first-person, lighter-and-camera-only investigation of an abandoned post-war hospital where illicit experiments were conducted on unwilling patients. There is no combat system, no skill tree, no branching dialogue. The entire loop is: find items, photograph evidence, advance a slow-burn horror narrative, and hope the jump scares land. For a strategy specialist like me who normally stress-tests resource curves and late-game decision trees, this is genuinely outside my wheelhouse - but that also makes it easier to judge on its own terms. The core mechanical loop is tighter than the genre average for a solo indie release. You carry a lighter for illumination and a camera with limited film to photograph specific objects and scenes. Running out of film at a critical puzzle - one player complaint that showed up repeatedly in community posts - is a genuine soft-lock risk if you burn frames on non-objectives. That one design quirk creates the only meaningful resource pressure in the game, and it is both the most interesting decision the game asks you to make and also the most frustrating when it goes wrong due to unclear signposting. The puzzles themselves are logic-based and accessible. Nothing here requires outside knowledge or pixel-hunting; attention to environmental hints is enough. Atmosphere is where the game earns its mixed-but-leaning-positive reception. The hospital setting drips with decay, and the sound design is notably careful - audio cues telegraph scares without being gratuitous, and community players consistently praised the jump scares as feeling earned rather than manufactured. The default gamma is set extremely low, which can read as a bug on first launch rather than an intentional design choice. Adjust it in settings before you write the game off as broken. The narrative - classified post-war experiments, lost souls, a journalist piecing together atrocities - is familiar horror shorthand, but the two-ending structure tied to thoroughness of investigation gives completionist types a reason to pay attention to every room rather than rushing toward the exit. Where Beside Myself genuinely struggles is scope and polish. At roughly one to one and a half hours of play, it is a short session rather than an evening. A solo developer product, it shows the seams of a limited budget in some asset reuse and the occasional progression bug where items or triggers fail to register correctly. Reports of Steam VR launching uninvited at startup also surfaced post-release, though the workaround is straightforward. There is no mod ecosystem, no post-launch content cadence, and no multiplayer to extend the hours. If depth of decision-making is your metric, this is not your game. The honest pitch is this: Beside Myself occupies the same niche as a short horror short film. If you want ninety minutes of atmospheric dread, a camera mechanic with just enough tension baked into limited film supplies, and two endings that reward careful play, the value proposition is defensible at its price point. Horror fans comfortable with walking-simulator pacing and solo indie production values will get what they came for. Everyone else should know exactly what the runtime buys before clicking anything.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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